Phil Neville won over Portland. His team couldn’t do the same.
On the end of Neville's tenure with the Portland Timbers.
PORTLAND — Phil Neville isn’t a naturally sympathetic figure.
He’s rich, had unbelievable success as a player, has a wonderful family and his friends include some of the most famous people in the world.
His hiring in Portland wasn’t celebrated three years ago, and he lost more games than he won after arriving. The final one reached a breaking point when the manager left the field to chants of “Neville out! Neville out! Neville out!” from the Timbers Army after Saturday’s 3-1 loss to San Jose.
The crowd got its wish two mornings later, when the club announced it had mutually agreed to part ways with the coach. He was 4-8-2 (14 points) on the year and 27-31-24 overall.
“I cannot thank Phil enough for his tireless dedication to this club,” said owner Merritt Paulson in a release.
“I realize we are in a results business, and the results haven’t been to the expectations of this football club,” added Neville.
With more than seven weeks until Portland’s next game, the club will start anew.
The way it all ended needs some time to digest, too.
The Timbers had just lost another game that was winnable. San Jose won for the first time ever at Providence Park in a game in which the Timbers controlled the ball for 65 percent of the match. But Portland conceded two goals in the game’s first 11 minutes, and after pulling within a goal on Antony’s first score since the season opener, the Timbers allowed one right back.
It was Antony’s tap-in miss in the 78th minute that ended the momentum of any late-stage Portland comeback.
From the 85th minute on, Providence Park showed the ruthlessness Neville had so often been calling for from his team. But instead, the mentality came from the supporters waving flags that read “Bye Phil” and “Fire Neville.”
“I think tonight was probably the perfect example of the 14 games,” Neville said after. “When you start in life, the foundations of life are to compete. And if you don’t compete, you can’t win at anything in life. I’ve got an incredible bunch of talented players, but if talented players aren’t willing to do the jobs that San Jose’s players — San Jose was a brilliant example. We told them all week about what that team is and why they’ve got the points that they got. It’s because they do the things that really matter to win games of football. And I think in the first 14 games, we’ve not done those things. And it’s why we are where we are in the table. It’s why we’ve got 14 points and I think it’s totally unacceptable.”
San Jose didn’t have the more talented team. But if getting players to do what they’re supposed to do falls under the responsibility of the manager, San Jose has one of the best in MLS in Bruce Arena.
For yet another game, it was clear: Portland’s disadvantage included the sideline, and the Timbers elected to make a change.
The irony in the rejection from Portland supporters after that final match is how different it was from the rejection Neville faced when he took over the club. The Timbers Army protested Neville’s hiring because of his perceived character, stemming from a couple of tweets from more than a decade earlier that Neville had repeatedly apologized for.
“Those first two or three weeks, I can’t say they were nice because they weren’t. You want your supporters to be on board with everything,” Neville told The I-5 Corridor in 2024 of the backlash. “When you make mistakes you have to live with them. But I have a feeling that once they get to know me and know my character, they’ll know that I’m not what those tweets were about.”
And he was right.
Neville made himself available to Portland’s supporters early in his tenure, and after a dreary start to his first season, slowly won them over with a team that had three players score 14-plus goals, including Evander, who finished third in MVP voting. It wasn’t great soccer, but it was fun soccer, and Neville fell in love with the city and fed off the energy of Portland’s supporters.
“For the first time in her life she’s going to a university where people aren’t looking at her, judging her, saying nasty things,” Neville said of his daughter Isabella, a student at the University of Portland with cerebral palsy. “At Portland, she’s just seen as Isabella Neville. I am proud of this city that I’ve been learning about because it’s accepted the most special girl in my life and is treating her normally.”
But the soccer became harder to accept once Evander left.
It wasn’t the manager’s fault that a player Neville compared to a “son” left in such a public manner following Portland’s disastrous 5-0 loss to Vancouver in the 2024 play-in game. But losing one of the best scorers in MLS removed Portland as an intimidating threat to anyone.
Coupled with a season-ending injury to designated player Jonathan Rodriguez, the Timbers fell from fourth in goals per game to 24th in 2025. While the Timbers did win a playoff game for the first time since 2021, it came amid a freefall. Portland entered the play-in game with one win in its last 10 matches, a stretch in which it was shut out four times.
Then the Timbers beat Salt Lake 3-1 at home to make the first round. After a Match 1 loss to San Diego, Neville had the best win of his Portland career when the Timbers responded with a penalty-kick win to even the series.
“It was the Thrilla in Manila — they were just throwing haymakers the whole game, it was dog-eat-dog, and it was a fight, and we had to keep going,” Neville said. “We took some risks with our tactics. We took some risks with our substitutions. I was always told by my father when I was younger that sometimes in life, you’ve got to take risks to win.”
Some perceived the Timbers were taking one by remaining with Neville after his second season ended a week later with a 4-0 loss to San Diego. After two years, Neville’s Timbers were exceedingly average: 23 wins, 23 losses and 22 draws. Yes, he had dealt with losing Evander, Rodriguez and midfielder Santiago Moreno abandoning the team midway through the 2025 season. But he was also hired to replace former coach Giovanni Savarese, who was fired in his fifth season with the club with a 74-62-47 overall record and a pair of MLS Cup appearances on his resume.
Savarese was 6-10-8 at the time of his firing, with the Timbers sitting in 12th place. After Saturday, Neville’s Timbers dropped to 13th. With the upcoming World Cup break and MLS preparing for a calendar change that will squeeze a 14-game “sprint” season between February and April of 2027 before the league’s new era begins in July, it felt like the Timbers had to make a move. Otherwise, those chants would have had nearly two months to echo.
Deep down, Neville understood.
“It’s not a pity party for me. Them supporters deserve better than what we’ve given in the first 14 games,” he said. “I think if I was in that Timbers Army, I’d be doing the same. I’d want more from my team, the team that I support, the team that I love, the team that I’m passionate about.”
It was the right thing to say. Neville rarely had a problem with that during his time in Portland. By then, few could question Neville’s passion, drive and, yes, character.
The issue, ultimately, wasn’t who Neville was.
It was who the Portland Timbers had become.
— Tyson Alger, The I-5 Corridor